life and landscape

another little tree post

My prepared paper from the UK has finally cleared customs. All that is needed is for the packages to be x-rayed to make sure I’m not smuggling any facebook apps into the country, and then it can be delivered. So, just to get my eye in I tootled downtown to get some Chinese paper for making some test cuts.

Chinese art shops are lovely places. There’s no consumer grade watercolours or painting by number kits. Only wonderful, high quality brushes, paints and bizarre selections of paper. There’s no set weights to the paper. It’s either thin, medium or card. All with deckle edges. I got some thin red and some black card.

OK. I cheated a little bit. Proper papercuts are made just with scissors. I tried, but tiny holes are so much easier with a scalpel. Just call it progress.

I wanted to see how a more delicate tree looked and if it worked extending the cut through the box. Oh. The box! I’m so glad my pre-cut boxes are arriving in the morning. This one took nearly an hour to build to make it look smart – and even then the card isn’t really heavy enough and it leans a bit. I’ve got 64 boxes in total in the final piece, and at that rate I just couldn’t build them all in time from scratch.

Still, I think the escaping branches works in principle. Originally I was to have 5 or 6 days to build the piece for net week. I’m now down to just 2 1/2 days. I hope I’ve got enough time to get this level of delicacy. On a much bigger piece it could look really beautiful.